The disciplines available to a marketing professional to promote sales of a particular product or brand are broadly categorized as advertising or public relations. Advertising refers to the informational print or broadcast solicitations designed to encourage the purchase of an item or create brand awareness. Advertising is useful to the marketing professional because it can be purchased for placement in a particular media, at a particular time and targeted to a particular audience. Public relations activities include encouraging and assisting in the placement of editorial events that occur in the various media, including print, radio and television and are not under the direct control of the marketing professional. It is well known in the retail industry that the presentation to the general public of a brand or product is more effective through an editorial rather than advertisement because the opinion or endorsement of an independent third party is inherently more believable by the public and therefore more valuable as a marketing tool for a retailer. Consequently a favorable editorial review is highly valued by the marketing professional. Furthermore, public relations events due to their inherent credibility are particularly useful to enhance or maintain the reputation of an image conscience retailer. Several problems exist however for the marketing professional with regard to the presentation of a product by way of an editorial event. In contrast to an advertisement, an editorial event can appear in any media, at any time and be viewed by a disparate audience. Furthermore, it is difficult if not impossible for the marketing professional to gauge the effectiveness of an editorial event as reflected in sales of a product or even in relation to an advertisement for the same product. Moreover, while the cost of a particular advertisement or advertising program is known by the company placing the advertisement, the value and effectiveness of public relations work performed in support of editorial events is less apparent. There is a lack of means to evaluate the effectiveness of an editorial event and even fewer means to compare the relative effectiveness of a plurality of editorial events to each other or to advertising.
Attempts to provide an objective measure of the marketing value of advertising and public relations events has up to now, not been very effective. The most prevalent method of measuring the effectiveness of advertising has been through the use of market research. Market research companies, exemplified by “The Arbitron Company”, “ACNielsen Company” and “Media Metrix” and “NetRatings” can be most generally described as providing statistical surveys of consumer behavior which includes; radio listening, television viewing, Internet usage, consumer purchasing and demographic data. This data can be used for setting advertising rates for radio and television and for tracking consumer behavior with respect to a particular company or product. However, market research firms lack the capability of measuring and analyzing the actual impact and impression created by a public relations campaign on an audience. Furthermore, market research does not compare editorial events to advertising or gauge their effect on sales.
Also available to the marketing professional are services that report the estimated value for advertising purchased for a particular product or brand. Companies such as Publishers Information Bureau exemplify these services. While this information can be useful to assess the relative exposure of a product or brand in the marketplace it provides no measure of the effectiveness of the advertisements nor does it include any information with regard to public relations activities. Likewise, demographic information from companies such as Audit Bureau Circulations is available that can provide data regarding the exposure of a particular advertisement, consumer behavior or consumer status. However, the companies that provide this information provide no means with which to analyze the performance of a particular editorial event.
In addition to the fact that the current tools available for the performance evaluation of editorial events are inadequate to obtain a true picture of the worth of an editorial event there also exists the problem that current sources of information do not provide as potential user with the capability of viewing a comprehensive report analyzing a plurality of editorial events for a product and brand.
A need therefore exist for a performance measurement method for public relations events, having the capability to consolidate in one place evaluations of the effectiveness of public relations activities and advertisements particularly with regard to sales